If the excitement over the imminent return of The Night Manager tells us anything, it’s that we cannot get enough of spies, especially those created by John le Carré. But what’s so fascinating about the many TV and film adaptations of his books is that they were never particularly cinematic in the first place.
Unlike the creator of that other enduring government operative, Ian Fleming, le Carré’s spies were the anti-James Bond: serious and sober, largely office-bound, and rarely given to driving cars at high speed. They wore watches not to shoot poisoned darts from, but to tell the time. Also unlike 007, these were secret agents who knew that it might be wise to remain undercover wherever possible.
And yet le Carré’s literary creations were always rich in detail and full of complexity, so it’s no surprise that the myriad screen versions have featured some generationally great performers – actors who favour roles in which to sink their teeth. These are among the very best.
The Night Manager (2016)
In this big-budget BBC production, sexily suited Tom Hiddleston gets to flex his spy credentials against such winningly exotic backdrops as Spain, Morocco and Switzerland. He plays Jonathan Pine, a retired British soldier who had been living a quiet life as a hotel manager until he’s reluctantly recruited into the inner circle of international arms dealer Richard Roper (a brilliantly slimy Hugh Laurie).
Roper complicates matters for Pine in all manner of ways, not least with the illicit temptations offered by his exotic girlfriend, played by Elizabeth Debicki. Olivia Colman also stars, essentially playing M to Hiddleston’s Bond, with the kind of relish normally found in a bottle of Hellmann’s.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
The Little Drummer Girl (2018)
Riding on the wave of The Night Manager’s success, The Little Drummer Girl was able to summon a comparably starry cast for another big budget TV series. Directed by Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave), it features Michael Shannon as an Israeli spymaster alongside Alexander Skarsgård as a Mossad agent, both of whom believe that a promising young British actress, played by Florence Pugh, has the necessary chops to become an undercover spy.
These six episodes require a lot of concentration as they flit between locations – London, Tel Aviv, Bonn – and various points of view, setting youthful idealism against world-weary cynicism. Pugh, then just 22, is particularly fantastic.
Streaming on BBC iPlayer
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979, 2011)
![Colin Firth as Bill Haydon, David Denick as Toby Esterhase, Toby Jones as Percy Allenine & John Hurt as Control in TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY Photo: Jack English All rights reserved. ???? 2010 StudioCanal SA [Credit must be included on all uses]](https://londonnewsnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/JIN_24103144-e1767099237957.jpg)
Not only the le Carré novel with the best title, but also his most famous work, this has been adapted twice for the screen. The venerable Alec Guinness first took the role of lugubrious MI6 operative George Smiley for a seven-part BBC series, with a pre-Slow Horses Gary Oldman doing similar a generation later in a film. Both are excellent because they are so faithful to the original text, Smiley more desk-bound operative than field agent who diligently keeps his nose to the grindstone in order to reap results for Queen and country.
Let Bond faff about in his flashy car; these are sombre examples of good striving to slay evil at departmental level. Oldman landed an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and rightly so.
The 1979 series is streaming on BBC iPlayer. The 2011 film is streaming on Prime Video
Our Kind of Traitor (2013)
It’s always intriguing to witness the creative licence individual filmmakers adopt when adapting le Carré. Here, British director Susanna White brings to life a plot that’s very nearly Dan Brown-adjacent. Ewan McGregor plays an impossibly handsome teacher of poetics, replete with long hair and a line in fitted jackets Ant and Dec would envy.
He’s trying to mend his relationship with wife Naomi Harris on holiday in Morocco, when they encounter a Russian mafia boss, played with terrific energy by Stellan Skarsgård. Fearing for his life, Skarsgård enrols McGregor’s help, and soon they are hopscotching from Finland to Switzerland to France, mostly fleeing gunfire. Poetry lecturers are not known their espionage skills, but McGregor proves a fast learner. Damien Lewis, looking the spit of Michael Caine in The Ipcress File, is perfectly cast as a stuffy, rules-observant MI6 agent.
Streaming on Prime Video
The Constant Gardner (2005)
To Kenya now, where Ralph Fiennes is a louche British diplomat who finds himself embroiled in a big pharma cover-up, one that plays out to deadly consequences close to home. One of le Carré’s later novels – published in 2001 – he found pharmaceutical giants to be every bit as plausible a common enemy as anyone the Cold War could have dished up. The central thesis here – that profit is of far greater importance than humanity – is horribly compelling. Bill Nighy and Danny Houston loiter with mischievous intent, but it’s Rachel Weisz, as Fiennes’s wife, who shines most. She won an Oscar for her role.
Streaming on Prime Video
The Tailor of Panama (2001)
Was there something deliberately coy in the casting of former James Bond Pierce Brosnan for a role that was very much Bond’s opposite? Surely, yes. Here, the world’s smoothest leading man plays a raffish and smug British diplomat who has embarrassed himself professionally and is sent to Panama to take stock of his poor life choices.
But old habits die hard, and he soon meets a fellow British expat – and ex-con – played by Jeffrey Rush, who, it transpires, is every bit as morally corrupt. Unusually, this is all played out to somewhat comedic effect, Brosnan so unlike a typical le Carré protagonist that the film is all the more fascinating for it.
Available to buy or rent on Prime Video, YouTube, Sky Store and Apple TV
A Most Wanted Man (2014)
Directed by the photographer Anton Corbyn (U2, Depeche Mode), this features the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final film role, in a le Carré novel from 2008. The Cold War milieu has been replaced by the fallout from 9/11, spies spying on spies, each exhorting the other to trust no one.
Hoffman is a heavy and sluggish presence, leading his character through a labyrinthine plot that takes a full 122 minutes to unpick itself. But the attention to detail is exquisite. The only real point of contention is that Hoffman and his co-stars Rachel McAdams and Willem Dafoe are required to play Germans, which they do less convincingly than, say, actual Germans. Dialect coaches can only do so much.
Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Sky Store and Prime Video
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965)
It is this film that set the standard for le Carré adaptations. Richard Burton stars as British spy Alec Leamus, sent to Berlin at the very height of the Cold War. Shot in handsome black and white, it fearlessly upends every prior expectation of 60s spy flicks by being so existential that it’s practically French. Leamus at one point muses: “How big does a cause have to be before you kill your friends?”
Burton, meanwhile, plays Leamus with intense melancholy, barely a flicker of emotion registering upon his seen-it-all-before, kill-me-now face. Even when he feels moved to make a humorous aside, he does so dourly. It comes while he’s being judged for his suitability for the job. Asked whether his handwriting is legible, his deadpan response is: “Except at weekends.” And that’s le Carré in a nutshell: dour, droll, compelling, hypnotic.
Streaming on Paramount+
‘The Night Manager’ series two is on BBC One at 9pm on New Year’s Day
